


Raise 'Em Up

by flyinggirl139



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Dean's Taste in Music, Episode: s01e01 Pilot, Episode: s04e01 Lazarus Rising, Eye of the Tiger, Feels, Ficlet Collection, Implied Destiel - Freeform, Inspired by Music, M/M, One Shot Collection, Other, The Impala - Freeform, The Roadhouse, kid!Dean, kid!Sam, teenage!Dean, theme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-12
Updated: 2015-03-12
Packaged: 2018-03-17 12:23:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3529256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyinggirl139/pseuds/flyinggirl139
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five (brotherly) Sam and Dean ficlets with a common theme. Last one has a bit of implied Destiel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Raise 'Em Up

**Author's Note:**

> I heard a Keith Urban/Eric Church song called "Raise 'Em Up" on the radio the other day and I got to thinking about all the different things that people raise into the air, and for what reasons, and ... yeah. This is the result. It's kind of a different style for me, so I hope you enjoy it.

 I.

> _In between jobs, Sam and Dean would sometimes get a day, sometimes a week, if they were lucky. … They could go anywhere and do anything. They drove a thousand miles for an Ozzy show …_

“I swear, man, you gotta update your cassette tape collection.”

“Why?” Dean had asked, watching Sam paw through the grubby shoebox he kept under the shotgun seat.

“Well, for one, they’re cassette tapes. And two, Black Sabbath? Motorhead? Metallica? It’s the greatest hits of mullet rock.”

That was a long time ago.

They were only about a quarter of the way back, in good seats. Great seats, actually, if you could call them “seats” while everyone was on their feet.

Sam had won the tickets in an online auction, printed them out at a local library.

Dean had exited their shitty motel room one dewy morning with a mumbled _gonna bring back some breakfast_ and a slammed door, the keys to the Impala jingling in his hand. Sam had smiled to himself when, a moment later, the door flew open again with a bang. Dean rushed into the room, pure joy on his face as he brandished the printed sheets he’d found on the front seat of his car. “ _Ozzy tickets, Sammy? You spectacular son of a bitch …_ ”

The first one probably went up in the third or fourth row back from the stage, and after that, the sky was full of them. Dean nudged his brother, and they’d both pulled their Zippos from their pockets and raised them high into the air, for one brief moment not hunting, killing, salt-and-burning, no one to chase or find or run away from, just the two of them standing in the screaming crowd with the chest-pounding music sweeping through their bodies and the flickering glow of a thousand lighters on their faces.

* * *

II.

It had been Dean, not John, who had first handed Sam a gun.

“If you’re gonna do what me and Dad do, you’re gonna have to learn to shoot, Sammy,” Dean said. He had stolen a couple of bikes and the boys had made their way to an old cemetery two and a half miles outside town, Dean promising Sam the whole way that he had a “surprise” for him. He thrust the gun into his brother’s chubby eight-year-old hands.

It was a pipsqueak of a Walther PPK, the kind of tiny handgun that comes in pink, but Sam was afraid of it all the same.

“Does Dad know we’re doin’ this?” he’d asked, his voice wavering the tiniest bit on the word “Dad.”

“No, so if you tell him I’ll kick your ass,” Dean had snarled, suddenly regretting every decision that had brought them here, especially the one where he’d filched the little gun from his father’s duffel bag. “Now c’mon, wimp. See that stone angel over there? I bet you can’t blow its head off.”

Sam squeezed his eyes shut and raised the gun.

* * *

III.

“Dean?”

There had been just the right note of hesitation in the woman’s voice as she called on him, and it was that tiny waver, that uncertainty, that Dean clung to, that drove him to contribute to the class discussion for the first time.

“I don’t think George is a – sympathetic character – at all. I think he’s a fucking asshole.”

He was seventeen and he was just starting to turn hard – his muscles, his fists, his outlook. When he’d raised his hand it wasn’t necessarily out of malice, but more a stupid, self-destructive need to drive this point home.

The poor woman blinked. She was young, brunette, pretty in a way that the adult Sam might have been interested in, but helpless.

“I’m glad you feel so passionately about the text, Mr. … Winchester … but I have to ask you to watch your language –”

“No, no, no, lady, listen to me. I’m trying to talk about the stupid book. He takes care of this guy for, what. Years? And Lennie trusts him? And George goes and shoots him in the head? What kind of fucking story is that?”

A girl with honey-blonde hair sitting in the second row had turned and rolled her eyes at him. In two days, he’d have her moving against his body, sighing into the warmth of his skin in the handicapped stall in the first-floor boy’s room, but at this moment Dean had this battle to fight with his unfortunate teacher.

“Perhaps Steinbeck wants us to consider the possibility that the ones we care about can sometimes be a burden to us.”

“Fuck that!” Dean had almost shouted. “Lennie trusted George! Like family! George had a responsibility to keep him safe!”

“Dean, language. Please.”

There had been a pause. Then Dean leaned heavily back in his chair, conscious of the blonde girl’s eyes on him. He snorted. “Fuck this class, honestly.”

The woman seemed to find her backbone as she wrote him a detention slip and slapped it onto his desk.

* * *

IV.

Nights at the Roadhouse were good nights.

Sometimes the boys found themselves pointed that way after a long hunt, enjoying the way they could unwind with a couple (or more than a couple) of beers and talk freely about how they’d spent their week. The way they didn’t have to worry about who was in earshot as they swapped gruesome stories with the other hunters. The way everybody in the room knew exactly who they were and nobody minded.

Some nights it was crowded, a party, and Ellen was kept too busy for more than a couple of words here and there. These were the nights Sam would absorb some other young hunter in a discussion about lore and Jo would drop a quarter into the old jukebox just to giggle as Dean lip-synced tipsily along to “Eye of the Tiger,” using his own extended leg as an air guitar.

Some nights it was slower and Sam and Dean would sit near the end of the bar, and Ellen would pour three whiskeys and lean on the counter to talk to them for a while.

For Sam, these conversations are what he assumes it’s like to have a mom.

Sometimes there would be a moment of just silence between the three of them, Jo glancing over as she wiped down the bar, and Sam and Dean and Ellen would all just gaze contemplatively down into their drinks.

Sometimes Ellen would raise her glass, her dark eyes serious as she said, “Here’s to savin’ the world.”

And three glasses would clink together.

* * *

V.

Dean had tried to stab him, he would remember later.

Actually, he’d done more than tried; he’d sunk the magic knife directly into the angel’s chest with a sickening crunch, and nothing had happened.

Later, of course, he would know that the only thing that would have killed Castiel at that moment was his own silver angel blade, but at that time, Dean had never heard of anything that his knife couldn’t kill, and it was pretty damn disconcerting to see the guy just yank it out and toss it to the floor.

“I’m the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition,” Castiel had said, and Dean thought of the welted handprint he’d discovered on his shoulder.

And then he’d tried to stab him.

Later Dean would remember that even at that moment, something had registered for him besides fear and confusion. He’d stared at the angel, all blue eyes and tousled dark hair, and something had made him stop grabbing for every weapon he could reach.

Bobby was – what? Passed out? Dead? on the floor, and this apparently immortal being was telling him, in this low gravelly voice, that he was an angel of the Lord and that they needed to have a talk.

And Dean found himself willing to listen.


End file.
